The head of one of the world’s biggest drug companies quit a presidential business panel as a result, saying he was taking a stand against intolerance and extremism. Critics slammed Trump for waiting too long to address the bloodshed, as well as for initially saying that “many sides” were involved, instead of singling out the white supremacists widely seen as sparking the melee. Several senators from his own Republican party had harsh words for him.

Some 48 hours into the biggest domestic challenge of his young presidency, Trump tried to correct course. “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” the president said in a statement to reporters at the White House on Monday (August 14th 2017). “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence,” he said.

A 20-year-old man said to have harbored Nazi sympathies was facing charges he plowed his car into protesters opposing the white nationalists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 people. The accused, James Fields, was denied bail at a court hearing on Monday (August 14th 2017).

Trump said anyone who engaged in criminal behavior at the rally would face justice, the Republican president said. “I wish that he would have said those same words on Saturday,” responded Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia on MSNBC. “I’m disappointed it took him a couple of days.” As the chorus of outrage over Virginia grew louder on Sunday, Trump stayed silent on the matter while at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The president tried to brush past questions about the alt-right, a term embraced by a segment of Trump’s base, and quickly tried to turn attention to the other side. “What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump asked. “What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

It was a fierce reversal that unwound much of the damage control Trump’s aides had pushed in recent days. Trump’s initial remarks — the president on Saturday condemned displays of bigotry, hatred and violence that occurred “on many sides” — were widely criticized for seeming to equate violence from white supremacists with counter-protesters.

It wasn’t until Monday (August 14th 2017) that Trump issued a new statement, declaring racism “evil” and forcefully condemning hate groups by name. But on Tuesday (August 15th 2017) he rejected that revision and doubled down on his initial approach. Trump cast himself as a cautious, fact-focused president, insisting that despite his history of celebrating vicious attacks or jumping the gun by offering speculation before law enforcement confirmed the facts, he was simply reserving judgment until the full story unfolded. “Before I make a statement, I need the facts. So I don’t wanna rush into a statement,” Trump explained. “So making the statement when I made it was excellent.”

Trump described the “alt-left” as a “very, very violent” group that charged at protesters without a permit to even assemble in Charlottesville. He reiterated that he condemned hate groups but argued that not everyone was a white supremacist or neo-Nazi. And there were “very fine people on both sides,” he added. “Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I notice that Stonewall Jackson’s coming down. I wonder: Is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, ‘Where does it stop?'”

Trump said he wouldn’t change a thing about his approach. “There was no way of making a correct statement that early. I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters,” he said. “I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts.”

Okay, so Trump flipped then he flopped then he flipped back again. Basically Trump showed his racism. Then someone wrote a speech for Trump to read with the correct words and everybody said well it’s 2 days late but at least he finally said it, but Trump could only stick with the good speech for 1 day and no more. Then Trump went right back to not only showing his racism but doubling down on that. And if you were surprised by any of this then you have not been paying attention.

His senior advisor, Steve Bannon (who’s also known as Trump’s brain, the manipulator-in-chief and President Bannon) basically Trumps right hand man, is a racist, a xenophobic and an anti Semite who wants to destroy the government or as Steve Bannon phrases it “the deconstruction of the administrative state” and that is just what they are doing. And let’s not forget that he’s a misogynistic sexist also.

Mr. Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing shake-ups, came as Mr. Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides” were to blame for the deadly violence at a Virginia rally last week. Critics of Mr. Bannon accused the president of channeling his chief strategist when he equated white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the left-wing protesters who opposed them.

“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”

A caustic presence in a chaotic West Wing, Mr. Bannon frequently clashed with the president’s other aides as they fought over trade, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, immigration and the role of government. In an interview this week, Mr. Bannon mocked his colleagues, including Gary D. Cohn, one of the president’s chief economic advisers, saying they were “wetting themselves” out of a fear of radically changing trade policy.

Mr. Trump had recently grown weary of Mr. Bannon, complaining to other advisers that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking information to reporters and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes. The situation had become untenable, according to advisers close to Mr. Trump who were urging the president to remove Mr. Bannon — and, in turn, people close to Mr. Bannon were urging him to step down — long before Friday.

Mr. Bannon’s removal is a victory for Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose mission is to impose discipline on White House personnel. Yet Mr. Bannon may still prove to be a confidant for the president, offering advice and counsel from the outside, much like other former advisers who still frequently consult with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon, in particular, had formed a philosophical alliance with Mr. Trump and they shared an unlikely chemistry.

Despite his ideological similarities with Bannon, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller is seen as safe. He joined the campaign long before Bannon and has his own relationships with the president and other senior advisers. He has also distanced himself from Bannon in recent weeks.

Bannon — the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, a fiery, hard-right news site that has gone to war with the Republican establishment — for months was locked in a long and tortuous battle with senior adviser Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and a coterie of like-minded senior aides, many with Wall Street ties.

Bannon had been expecting to be cut loose from the White House, people close to him said. One of them explained that Bannon was resigned to that fate and is determined to continue to advocate for Trump’s agenda on the outside.

And his pick for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a long time racist that Coretta Scott King wrote a letter against being a judge 30 years ago was sworn in. And let’s not forget that he’s a misogynistic sexist also. And Sessions’ pick for Solicitor general, the attorney that actually goes to court for the government, is a long time segregationist. Other than being a segregationist I know little about him but he’s probably a misogynistic sexist like the rest. Trump once said that Black people have no education, no jobs, no housing, and that every time they leave out their doors (which I don’t know where they are leaving from because if they have no housing then that means they are all homeless so he must mean every time they get up from sleeping on the street) they are all shot at like they are in war zones.

Any time he does something that people don’t like and they complain about it then he blames any and everybody else but himself, he doesn’t take responsibility for anything like a child, he just lies about it and tries to either blame Obama for it even though Obama had nothing to do with it or blame the Democrats or blame the courts (the courts) or blame the media and claim it’s a lie, which it’s not or claim it’s fake news, which it’s not, it’s just Trump lying again. Everybody is lying but Trump and he says it’s “unfair”. Trump even creates his own fake news, for example, a Time magazine with Trump on the cover hangs in his golf clubs, it’s fake. Sometimes he tries to distract people with something else other than what people are paying attention to, kind of like hey look at the shiny thing over here while he has his people brake into your car and steal all your stuff. On The Rachel Maddow Show Rachel Maddow explains that because Donald Trump does not own or value the presidency, the harm his offensive behavior does to the office and the U.S. generally for political gain is not something he cares about. He only likes the media if one of them asks him nice and easy questions that he likes otherwise he hates them because they expose the truth so he tries to blame them for any and everything he can think of and he calls them “the enemy of the people”, Nixon said “the press is the enemy” and that’s what most fascist dictators say about the media.

And then he tries to use the media to spread propaganda about people he does not like such as immigrants (that’s something Hitler did in the past and other fascist dictators have done and will continue to do). But Nixon was behind closed doors with his crap, Trump is just out in the open with his crap because he’s not smart enough to be behind closed doors with it. Fascist dictators always hate the media because they expose the truth, Hitler hated the media and Putin hates the media, Putin dismantled the media in his country. Trump is on step 1; one of the 1st things that fascist dictators do is try to delegitimize the media one way or another because fascist dictators only want the public to know what the fascist dictator wants the public to know but not the truth, never the truth. That’s why some countries run by fascist dictators have a state run media so the fascist dictators can easily control what the public knows because the fascist dictator is telling the state run media what to say and if they say anything different than what the fascist dictator wants, like the truth, then they end up either in jail or with a bullet in their head, like in Russia and North Korea. Hopefully Trump will not be able to get that far in the US. But after Trump has gotten as far as he has I never say never.

The news conference came against the backdrop of repeated pressure by Mr. Trump, in public and in private, for the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to search harder for people inside the government who have been telling reporters what was happening behind closed doors.

The Trump administration has been bedeviled by leaks large and small that have brought to light information ranging from White House infighting and the president’s rancorous phone conversations with foreign leaders to what surveillance showed about contacts by Mr. Trump’s associates with Russia — and even what Mr. Trump said to Russian visitors in the Oval Office about his firing of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.

Not all leaks are illegal, and many of the disclosures about palace intrigue at the White House that have irritated Mr. Trump violated no law. However, the Espionage Act and several other federal laws do criminalize unauthorized disclosures about certain national security information, like surveillance secrets. Officials declined to discuss which specific leaks are under investigation or who the suspects may be.

Several advocacy groups for reporters and First Amendment issues sharply criticized the statements made during the news conference, as did Martin Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post. “Sessions talked about putting lives at risk,” Mr. Baron said. “We haven’t done that. What we’ve done is reveal the truth about what administration officials have said and done. In many instances, our factual stories have contradicted false statements they’ve made.”

Matt Purdy, a deputy managing editor of The New York Times, said: “There’s a distinction between revelations that make the government uncomfortable and revelations that put lives at risk. We have not published information that endangers lives.” The Post and The Times declined to comment about whether the government had contacted them regarding leak investigations.

A media subpoena is a writ compelling a journalist to testify or produce evidence, with a penalty for failure to do so. The fact that the administration is reviewing its policy leaves open the possibility of sentencing journalists for not disclosing their sources. “Every American should be concerned about the Trump administration’s threat to step up its efforts against whistleblowers and journalists,” said Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union. “A crackdown on leaks is a crackdown on the free press and on democracy as a whole.”

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters the department was just starting to review the policy on media subpoenas and could not say yet how it might be changed. But he did not rule out the possibility of threatening journalists with jail time.

When a president starts putting the media in jail, especially en masse, that is step 1 to formally and officially being under the rule of a fascist dictator. Trump is a fascist dictator, also known as autocracy. And that is the beginning of the end of the free press and of democracy.

Historically, government employees or contractors who give sensitive information to the media are much more likely to be prosecuted than the reporters who receive it. U.S. regulations give journalists special protections, barring them from law enforcement that might “reasonably impair newsgathering activities.”

Federal prosecutors must get special permission from the U.S. attorney general before issuing a subpoena to try to force a member of the news media to divulge information to authorities. New York Times reporter Judith Miller was jailed in 2005 for refusing to reveal a source about stories on Iraq, but she cut a deal with prosecutors before she was formally charged. In addressing the wider issue of leaks, Sessions said the Justice Department has tripled the number of investigations into unauthorized leaks of classified information and that four people have already been charged.

It is not illegal to leak information, as such, but divulging classified information is against the law. Some of the more high-profile leaks in the Trump administration have revealed White House infighting in articles that would appear not to involve divulging classified information. Sessions did not immediately give the identities of the four people charged, but said they had been accused of unlawfully disclosing classified information or concealing contacts with foreign intelligence officers.

And Sinclair Broadcast Group is helping that effort with their own version of Trump propaganda taking over your local channels. And you would not be able to tell that Sinclair Broadcast Group has taken over your local channel because they do not brand them like Fox does.